Earlier this year, developer Cory LaViska created Quiet UI, a gorgeous and feature-rich web component library. With his experience behind Shoelace and Web Awesome, LaViska brought something special to the table—a collection of interesting experiments and features that pushed the boundaries of web components.

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LaViska launched Quiet UI with a dual-license approach: free for personal and non-commercial use, with a paid commercial option. It's a model many independent developers have tried, hoping to fairly compensate their work while keeping software accessible to individuals and non-profits.

The results were telling. After just a month or two, LaViska had sold only two or three licenses. In a now-deleted blog post, he expressed his frustration: "companies will pay massive salaries to devs but won't spend $100 or so on something that will save hundreds of hours of work."

This story isn't an isolated incident. It's a symptom of a deeper, systemic issue in the open source ecosystem—one that has been growing more apparent as open source has become the backbone of modern technology infrastructure.

The Unsustainable Economics of Open Source

As one developer recently wrote, "open source is still broken." The fundamental problem lies in the massive imbalance between who benefits from open source and who contributes to it.

Big technology companies profit immensely from free labor while contributing little or nothing back. This isn't just a matter of courtesy—it's a structural issue that makes it nearly impossible for individual developers or small teams to sustain meaningful open source work long-term.

Various monetization models have emerged, but each comes with significant drawbacks:

  • Sponsorship models generate very little money, even for popular projects that serve millions of users
  • Pro Tiers with unique features effectively gatekeep hobbyists and public good initiatives—the very communities open source aims to serve
  • Sponsorware, where features are only built if certain sponsorship goals are met, inherits the same problems as sponsorship models
  • Dual Licensing, while fixing some of the Pro Tier issues, remains a hard sell unless a project has already achieved significant popularity

The Quiet UI Case Study: A Cautionary Tale

What makes the Quiet UI story particularly telling is its rapid trajectory. After switching to an MIT license to encourage wider adoption, LaViska implemented a sponsorship model offering prioritized bug fixes for sponsors.

Then, less than two weeks later, the project vanished. LaViska pulled Quiet UI from GitHub, removed all documentation, and deleted his blog post about the project.

"Quiet UI is no longer available to the general public. I will continue to maintain it as my personal creative outlet, but I am unable to release it to the world at this time. Thanks for understanding. I'm really sorry for the inconvenience."

While overlap with LaViska's professional work at Web Awesome may have played a role, the underlying message remains clear: even talented, experienced developers with proven track records struggle to monetize their open source work.

The Psychological Toll of Unappreciated Work

Beyond the economic challenges, there's a significant psychological component to this crisis. Developers invest countless hours creating tools that solve real problems, only to see those tools ignored or undervalued.

As one developer candidly shared about their own project Kelp: "I totally understand that pull [Cory] felt to see his work actually used by people. It's frustrating to build something awesome AF, and have no one use it."

This creates a vicious cycle: developers pour their passion into projects, become disillusioned by the lack of support, and either abandon their work or restrict access, ultimately harming the very community they hoped to serve.

The Path Forward: Rethinking Open Source Sustainability

The current situation isn't sustainable. As open source becomes increasingly central to technology infrastructure, we need new models that fairly compensate contributors while maintaining the collaborative spirit that makes open source powerful.

Some potential directions include:

  • Corporate contribution mandates requiring companies to contribute back to the projects they depend on
  • Foundation-backed infrastructure providing sustainable funding for critical open source projects
  • Usage-based models that fairly compensate projects based on actual commercial utilization
  • Community-supported development where users collectively fund ongoing maintenance and enhancement

The disappearance of projects like Quiet UI should serve as a wake-up call. We cannot continue to build our digital infrastructure on a foundation of uncompensated labor, expecting passionate individuals to indefinitely subsidize the technology that powers our economy.

The future of open source depends on our ability to create economic models that value contribution as much as consumption. Until then, we risk losing not just individual projects, but the innovative spirit that has made open source one of technology's greatest success stories.